“Captain Schelle, Captain Exson” | Ansley Echols

For its Fall Play, our high school performing arts company, Back à Dos, was proud to present he US première of a wild, playful and thought- provoking work, written by French playwright, Serge Rezvani, translated by Eric Butler and irected by Franck Bessone. This cartoonish comedy was set on an oil tanker adrift at sea
because the Children of the Captains abandoned ship,
destroying the machinery before departing. Those left
behind include captains, wives, mistresses and servants,
but also Crude Oil in the hold ready to revolt!

In his program notes, director Franck Bessone ex-plained that he was first motivated by “the desire to doa comedy. Thus, this play is, first and foremost, a biglaugh.” However, he also explains, “Ultimately, it’s notjust any kind of comedy, of course. It’s a dark com-edy. Or a tale, a modern tale, with the monsters andghosts—money and power—that our civilization hascreated. Named after gas stations or oil companies, theplay’s protagonists are just the greedy avatars of a flouteddemocracy.” This motivated Bessone to ask the studentcostume designer, Alexa Joshua, to create costumes forthe Crude Oil that, in his words, could “evoke diversefigures of domination and rebellion, not only the 18thCentury slaves, as the play suggests, but also those of theMiddle East, Cuba, the French Revolution.”Bessone notes that at the end of the piece, “Thehanged men are waking up and are ready to reciprocatethe ‘justice’ they received; ‘Eye-for-an-Eye’ is the nameof their leader.”

For the Back à Dos winter show, the annual student-di-rected one-act play festival embraced six pieces directed
by International High School seniors: Cléo Charpentier,
Larson Holt, Rosalie Neal, William Ramstein, Abby
Rochman, and Sylvie Sutton. These six directors oversaw
an eclectic evening of new work, ranging from mystery
to horror, from post-modern exploration to comedy, in
myriad forms.